Do you want to fight, Munson?" he said softly, brutally, coming close and menacing behind the other boy.
 "If he wants to make something out of it--" the Munson boy began again.
 "Well, then, make it!" cried Carl Hooton, with a brutal laugh, and at the same moment gave the Munson boy a violent shove that sent him hurtling forward against the pinioned form of his antagonist. Sid Purtle sent his captive hurtling forward at the Munson boy; in a second more, they were crouching toe to toe, and circling round each other.
 Sid Purtle's voice could be heard saying quietly: "If they want to fight it out, leave 'em alone! Stand back and give 'em room!"
 "Wait a minute!"
 The words were spoken almost tonelessly, but they carried in them such a weight of quiet and inflexible command that instantly all the boys stopped and turned with startled surprise, to see where they came from.
 Nebraska Crane, his bat upon his shoulder, was advancing towards them from across the street. He came on steadily, neither quickening nor changing his stride, his face expressionless, his black Indian gaze fixed steadily upon them.
 "Wait a minute!" he repeated as he came up.
 "What's the matter?" Sidney Purtle answered, with a semblance of surprise.
 "You leave Monk alone," Nebraska Crane replied.
 "What've we done?" Sid Purtle said, with a fine show of innocence.
 "I saw you," said Nebraska with toneless stubbornness, "all four of you ganged up on him; now leave him be."
 "Leave him be?" Sid Purtle now protested.
 "You heard me!"
 Carl Hooton, more brutal and courageous and less cautious than Sid Purtle, now broke in truculently: "What's it to you? What business is it of yours what we do?"
 "I make it my business," Nebraska answered calmly. "Monk," he went on, "you come over here with me."
 Carl Hooton stepped before the Webber boy and said: "What right have you to tell us what to do?"
 "Get out of the way," Nebraska said.
 "Who's gonna make me?" said Carl Hooton, edging forward belligerently.
 "Carl, Carl--come on," said Sid Purtle in a low, warning tone.
 "Don't pay any attention to him. If he wants to get on his head about it, leave him be."
 There were low, warning murmurs from the other boys.
 "The rest of you can back down if you like," Carl Hooton answered, "but I'm not takin' any backwash from him. Just because his old man is a policeman, he thinks he's hard. Well, I can get hard, too, if he gets hard with me."
 "You heard what I told you!" Nebraska said. "Get out of the way!"
 "You go to hell!" Carl Hooton answered. "I'll do as I damn please!"
 Nebraska Crane swung solidly from the shoulders with his baseball bat and knocked the red-haired fellow sprawling. It was a crushing blow, so toneless, steady, and impassive in its deliberation that the boys turned white with horror, confronted now with a murderous savagery of purpose they had not bargained for. It was obvious to all of them that the blow might have killed Carl Hooton had it landed on his head; it was equally and horribly evident that it would not have mattered to Nebraska Crane if he had killed Carl Hooton. His black eyes shone like agate in his head, the Cherokee in him had been awakened, he was set to kill. As it was, the blow had landed with the sickening thud of ash-wood on man's living flesh, upon Carl Hooton's arm; the arm was numb from wrist to shoulder, and three frightened boys were now picking up the fourth, stunned, befuddled, badly frightened, not know ing whether a single bone had been left unbroken in his body, whether he was permanently maimed, or whether he would live to walk again.
 "Carl--Carl--are you hurt bad? How's your arm?" said Sidney Purtle.
 "I think it's broken," groaned that worthy, clutching the injured member with his other hand.
 "You--you--you hit him with your bat," Sid Purtle whispered.
 "You--you had no right to do th

3
 
 
 
 

Two Worlds Discrete

WHEN AUNT MAW SPOKE, AT TIMES THE AIR WOULD BE FILLED WITH unseen voices, and the boy knew that he was listening to the voices of hundreds of people he had never seen, and knew instantly what those people were like and what their lives had been. Only a word, a phrase, an intonation of that fathomless Joyner voice falling quietly at night with an immense and tranquil loneliness before a dying fire, and the unknown dead were moving all around him, and it seemed to him that now he was about to track the stranger in him down to his last dark dwelling in his blood, explore him to his final secrecy, and make all the thousand strange, unknown lives in him awake and come to life again.
 And yet Aunt Maw's life, her time, her world, the fathomless intonations of that Joyner voice, spoken quietly, interminably at night, in the room where the coal-fire flared and crumbled, and where slow time was feeding like a vulture at the boy's heart, could overwhelm his spirit in tides of drowning horror. Just as his father's life spoke to him of all things wild and new, of exultant prophecies of escape and victory, of triumph, flight, new lands, the golden cities--of all that was magic, strange, and glorious on earth--so did the life of his mother's people return him instantly to some dark, unfathomed place in nature, to all that was tainted by the slow-smouldering fires of madness in his blood, some ineradicable poison of the blood and soul, brown, thick, and brood ing, never to be cured or driven out of him, in which at length he must drown darkly, horribly, unassuaged, unsavable, and mad.
 Aunt Maw's world came from some lonely sea-depth, some huge abyss and maw of drowning time, which consumed all things it fed upon except itself--consumed them with horror, death, the sense of drowning in a sea of blind, dateless Joyner time. Aunt Maw fed on sorrow with a kind of tranquil joy. In that huge chronicle of the past which her terrific memory wove forever, there were all the lights and weathers of the soul--sunlight, Summer, singing--but there was always sorrow, death and sorrow, the lost, lonely lives of men there in the wilderness. And yet she was not sorrowful herself. She fed on all the loneliness and death of the huge, dark past with a kind of ruminant and invincible relish, which said that all men must die save only these triumphant censors of man's destiny, these never-dying, all-consuming Joyner witnesses of sorrow, who lived, and lived forever.
 This fatal quality of that weblike memory drowned the boy's soul in desolation. And in that web was everything on earth--except wild joy.
 Her life went back into the wilderness of Zebulon County before the Civil War.
 "Remember!" Aunt Maw would say in a half-amused and half impatient voice, as she raised the needle to the light and threaded it.
 "Why, you fool boy, you!" she would exclaim in scornful tones, "What are you thinkin' of! Of course I can remember! Wasn't I right there, out in Zebulon with all the rest of them, the day they came back from the war?... Yes, sir, I saw it all." She paused, reflecting. "So here they came," she continued tranquilly, "along about ten o'clock in the morning--you could hear them, you know, long before they got there- around that bend in the road--you could hear the people cheerin' all along the road--and, of course, I began to shout and holler along with all the rest of them," she said, "I wasn't goin' to be left out, you know," she went on with tranquil humor, "--and there we were, you know, all lined up at the fence there--father and mother and your great uncle Sam. Of course, you never got to know him, boy, but he was there, for he'd come home sick on leave at Christmas time. He was still limpin' around from that wound he got--and of course it was all over or everyone knew it would be before he got well enough to go on back again. Hm," she laughed shortly, knowingly, as she squinted at her needle, "At least that's what he said-----"
 "What, Aunt Maw?"
 "Why, that he was waitin' for his wound to heal, but, pshaw!"- she spoke quietly, shaking her head--"Sam was lazy--oh, the laziest feller I ever saw in all my life!" she cried. "Now if the truth were told, that was all that was wrong with him--and let me tell you something; it didn't take long for him to get well when he saw the war was comin' to an end and he wouldn't have to go on back and join the rest of them.
 He was limpin' around there one day leanin' on a cane as if every step would be his last, and the next day he was walkin' around as if he didn't have an ache or a pain in the world....
 "'That's the quickest recovery I ever heard of, Sam,' father said to him. 'Now if you've got some more medicine out of that same bottle, I just wish you'd let me have a little of it.'--Well, then, so Sam was there." She went on in a moment, "And of course Bill Joyner was there -old Bill Joyner, your great-grandfather, boy--as hale and hearty an old man as you'll ever see!" she cried.
 " Bill Joyner... why he must have been all of eighty-five right then, but you'd never have known it to look at him! Do anything! Go anywhere! Ready for anything!" she declared. "And he was that way, sir, right up to the hour of his death--lived over here in Libya Hill then, mind you, fifty miles away, but if he took a notion that he'd like to talk to one of his childern, why he'd stand right out and come, with out waitin' to get his hat or anything. Why yes! didn't he turn up one day just as we were all settin' down to dinner, without a hat or coat or anything!" she said.